Image courtesy of Vichaya Kiatying-Angsulee at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
A Day in the Life of a Gargoyle
My name is Jasper. Like most gargoyles, I’m named after the type of stone used in my body. So you want to know what my typical day is like, huh?
The answer depends on whether you mean a day Before or After Dorotea came into my life.
Before is easy. All the days were the same. In fact, there were no days, because there were no periods of sunlight, only endless hours of darkness trapped in stasis.
You see, when I was a child the humans declared all the gargoyles traitors and imprisoned us magically in the Cavern of Traitors.
Stasis. It’s a neutral word for something close to torture. Imagine not being able to move. Ever. Not to scratch an itch or stretch or turn your head. Not even to blink. Trapped as a statue inside your own body, but aware. Now imagine that you used to be an active little boy, who liked to run and jump and play.
It’s enough to drive you mad. Well, some gargoyles did go insane. Most of us didn’t because we had a secret way to communicate through the stone. So we were trapped in darkness for over a decade, but it wasn’t a silent darkness.
As the only child (gargoyles are long-lived and seldom reproduce) I was kind of everyone’s pet project. They’d take turns telling me stories and, as I grew older, teaching me our history and mathematics and, well, everything they could think of to distract me.
That’s what most of my ‘days’ were like. Dull beyond description.
Until she came. Dorotea. She woke me up. Pulled me out of stasis, into light and color and wonderful, wonderful movement. But not to free me. Oh, no. See, she believed all the lies her people told her about gargoyles being brutes and savages who’d as soon break a human’s neck as look at them. So I woke up—with a magical slave collar around my neck.
After that, more happened in a single day than all the years that came before: getting enslaved, almost drowning, talking to a Goddess, fighting men with sledgehammers, saving Dorotea’s ungrateful ass, forging a truce only to have it fall apart—and then things really went sideways.
About the Author:
Nicole Luiken wrote her first book at 13 and was published at 16. She lives with her family in Edmonton. It is impossible for her to go more than three days in a row without writing.
Amid Wind & Stone
by Nicole Luiken
(Otherselves #2)
Behind the mirror lies your otherself…
There is one True World, and then there are the four Mirror Worlds: Fire, Water, Air, and Stone.
Audrey and Dorotea are “ otherselves”—twin copies of each other who live on different Mirror Worlds.
On Air, Audrey has the ability to communicate with wind spirits. As war looms, she’s torn between loyalty to her country and her feelings for a roguish phantom who may be a dangerous spy.
Blackouts and earthquakes threaten the few remaining humans on Stone, who have been forced to live underground. To save her injured sister, Dorotea breaks taboo and releases an imprisoned gargoyle. Brooding, sensitive Jasper makes her wonder if gargoyles are truly traitors, as she’s always been told.
Unbeknownst to them, they both face the same enemy—an evil sorceress bent on shattering all the Mirror Worlds.
I love gargoyles…. will have to try this out!
I hope you do! 🙂